We describe the system design of “Smart Kindergarten”,
a smart problem solving environment for early
childhood education. Two crucial building blocks that
make up Smart Kindergarten are iBadge, a lightweight
power-aware sensor-instrumented badge, and Sylph, a
sensor middleware infrastructure. Equipped with sensors,
radio, and DSP, iBadge has been designed to be worn by
kids and teachers to unobtrusively capture the interaction
between the kids and their surroundings. The captured
data is then wirelessly transmitted to Sylph, a middleware
infrastructure, which provides means of accessing the
data in coherent and user-friendly manner. In this paper,
we present the design challenges of iBadge and Sylph and
our efforts in integrating these two systems.